In The Service of Liars and Killers

Natalia Romanova is born in the middle of winter, hair as red as blood and skin as white as snow. The baby kicks her feet and opens deathly green eyes, and the whole world screams with her power and her pain. She is going to change it, this little girl. The land knows, knows that she will splatter the ground with blood, soak the air with the screams of men, women and children. The earth knows the Black Widow, even if her parents do not.

Anthony Edward Stark is born on an autumn day in a hospital in upstate New York. The world knows, the land recognizes that this man will have blood on his hands, more blood than even his father could dream of touching. Merchant of Death, they will call him. The whispers already know, and the world trembles at his genius.

For years, Natalia is trained by the Red Room. They take her will and shape it into something that they can use, take her hands, delicate white hands that are destined to know blood. Natalia Romanova knows blood. The earth trembles at her touch, and the men that think they control her direct her to the ones that they want her to kill. Natalia bides her time, watches and waits for her chance.

Anthony Stark grows, and grows. His genius knows no bounds—robotics, intelligence and weapons, all coming apart and moving around in his capable hands. His father watches, and loves from afar, but never too close—Howard Stark is mercurial in his moods and unable to show his only child peace and love—Howard Stark manufactures weapons, and his hands know more blood than gentleness. He keeps his distance and his son kills more than he ever has.

When Natalia gets her chance, she kills the men that hold her leash and she runs. She can only do one thing—kill, and she sees no reason not to continue killing if that is what will make her money.

The darkness is endless, and all she sees is blood and shadow. Then he comes—Clint Barton, recruited by SHIELD from the circus. Natalia sees herself in his eyes, and he sees himself in her—he offers her an out. He brings her in, cleans her up and offers her a chance to fix what she has taken, to put an end to what she's done.

Anthony Edward Stark is not what she is expecting—dying, and fearful of it, but still brave enough to do what he thinks is right. He's an asshole and a player and he treats his bed partners like they are trash, but he fixes what matters, and he saves the people that matter. When his weapons come up in hands that use them wrongly, Tony hunts them down himself, and Natalia—now called Natasha, because SHIELD may be better, but it isn't good by any stretch of the imagination, and she won't let them have that piece of her—cannot help but admire that, cannot help but support that.

She is a SHIELD plant, put into his company to flirt her way into his confidence and find out how close he is to dead.

It turns out that he is very close to dead.

Natasha fixes him and puts the pieces back together, and then she goes away again, and leaves him in Pepper Potts' capable hands.

She goes away, and she doesn't see him again until he makes an entrance in Stuttengard, blasts bad rock music through her PA and blasts Loki head over heels and back onto the ship.

Anthony Stark knows better than to trust the only person on the entire ship with as much blood on their hands as he has—and at least his is second-hand blood, borrowed and explained away by anyone else as ignorance. Tony doesn't explain it away, doesn't see the blood as anything other than his penance and his fault.

Merchant of Death turned Merchant of Life, they call him when he builds his tower in the sky—a monument with his name on it, yes, but finally something good with his name on it, something that can save rather than kill.

Then Loki uses his good thing to open a portal to hell, to let through an army that slaughters and wrecks. Tony stops them. Nobody uses his technology to kill, ever again, even if he has to die to prevent it.

They have all scattered their separate ways, but Natasha comes back. She lives in his tower with him and Pepper Potts—but it turns out that even Pepper's hands can break, can destroy hearts. Or maybe it is because Tony's hands cannot do anything but destroy, no matter how he tries to change that. But one of them breaks the other's heart, and Pepper moves back to Malibu to run the company and get some space. (She does not leave his company, does not leave him. She will be there for him forever, even if she cannot love him that way)

She leaves, and Tony and Natasha are alone in the tower. Tony builds floors for the others, a floor with opening windows and rappelling hooks outside for Clint, and a floor with a reinforced room for Bruce, and a floor with big, over the top gold decorations for Thor. He builds a technology free, idiot proof floor for Steve and for Natasha, he builds something that she can decorate, something that she can build.

This is the first time that she kisses him. He hands her something to create, something that her hands can touch without destroying, something that will build and live instead of kill. She does not decorate her floor. She moves up to the penthouse instead, and she adds fluffy pillows and fancy rugs to Tony's modern penthouse.

Between the two of them, there is more blood than in the entire world, but together they hope to heal it, try to put some of it back. She doesn't know where the battle against Loki, where being involved with the Avengers fits into her ledger (red or black), and she doesn't know if it will help wipe out anything, if her red can even be wiped out, but she knows that his blood is as extensive as hers and if this is how he does it, she must be doing something right.

Everything that he touches turns to blood, and everything that she lays her fingers on breaks, but together they try to build enough to counteract it.

When they can't fix it, they take each other apart, because they were built to destroy and everything that they touch burns despite what they do to fix it.

Her nails score scars down his back as he fucks her so hard that she might shatter, but still, she begs for him to hurt her a little bit more—maybe her pain can be her penance, her broken pieces can go into her ledger in black instead of blood red.

Maybe she should have lived in the middle ages—a life for a life, an eye for an eye—she would have paid for the blood that she spilt long before she ever got the chance to spill so much of it, to break the earth with all of the blood on her hands.

First Thor moves in, with nowhere to go after Asgard, and he brings Jane Foster with him. She is beautiful and dreamy and genius. But she does not know blood, not the way that Tony and Natasha do. Thor understands blood, but not guilt. Thor is the warrior of his people, their protector and their shielder—there is no shame in the blood that he spills, no guilt or anything to hide.

Then Bruce comes back, lured by Tony's R and D tower, trying to pay for his blood, his imagined slights. He has no idea of the truth—that when there is no monster to hide behind, you will pay for your blood forever, that there is no penance for the things that they have broken apart. Bruce Banner is a doctor—he fixes as well as breaks, and he will never truly have red in his ledger—even if the Hulk's enraged actions did count against him, the good that he does in Calcutta and India has long made up for it.

Clint comes next, Natalia's circus performer with death in his eyes. Of all of the people that she had met, he was the most like her. But his blood was like a puddle next to the ocean when compared to hers, and he will never count, never weigh the scales. Perhaps he is simply a different kind of person than her, or perhaps it is because he can never comprehend the kind of blood that coats her.

Steve comes last, the super soldier that was chosen to be made into a hero's body because he was already a hero in every other way that counted. Steve perhaps understands the blood on their hands the least, understands little of what Howard Stark created—Howard Stark created weaponry for his country, after all. And he created Iron Man, or the child who would grow up to become Iron Man. He will never understand that before Iron Man came the Merchant of Death. Steve's blood is justified and righteous, and spilled in defence of his country, and he will never feel its weight the way that they do.

They live in their tower in the sky—Clint is the only one who understands their relationship, understands what they do to each other. Thor is puzzled by them, and Bruce thinks that he understands but he doesn't, and Steve will never get that their blood is not the same as his.

Natasha likes the cold—the blood freezes in the cold, goes hard and dark and flinty, instead of sticky and gushy and hot, all over the ground and soaking into the dirt. She drowns in it—her blood and Tony's blood, running together—Tony creates and all it does is kill, and she destroys without even the pretense of creation to fill her path. As Loki said:

"You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code, something that makes up for the horrors. But they are a part of you, and they will never go away!"

Natasha remembers her horrors, and they will never leave, and she can never repay the lives that she took and the people that she hurt, but she can try to do some good, try to balance the scales or at least make the red less somehow. Something that she does has to help, right?

Tony remembers Afghanistan, remembers the people there that his weapons destroyed, remembers a man that was too brave to lie down and let them harm him—Yinsen.

But they close their eyes and they watch and wait for another day, another fight—another chance to fight back the red, even if it is futile.